When a Java program starts, one thread starts running immediately that thread is known as main thread in Java.
If you run the following program where you have not created any thread, still on printing the thread name you can see that the thread name is displayed as “main”. This is the main thread which started running automatically.
public class ThreadDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Thread name- " + Thread.currentThread().getName());
}
}
Output
Thread name- main
Main thread - Java multi-threading
A thread spawned from the current thread inherits the following properties from the parent thread-
- Thread priority
- Thread is a daemon thread or not
Since main thread is the first thread that is started so other threads are spawned from the context of the main thread and other threads will inherit above mentioned properties from main thread.
Also note that the JVM terminates only after all the non-daemon threads have finished execution. In your application if you have other non-daemon threads executing then main thread can terminate before those threads. So, main thread is the first to start in your application but it doesn’t have to be the last to finish.
Here is a Java example of main thread where three more threads are spawned. Since all the three threads are spawned from main thread so they should have same priority and should be non-daemon threads. Main thread object is passed to the spawned threads to keep checking that main thread is alive or not using isAlive() method.
class NumThread implements Runnable{
Thread mainThread;
public NumThread(Thread thread) {
this.mainThread = thread;
}
@Override
public void run() {
System.out.println(Thread.currentThread().getName()+ " Priority "
+ Thread.currentThread().getPriority());
System.out.println("Is Daemon Thread " + Thread.currentThread().isDaemon());
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
System.out.println(Thread.currentThread().getName() + " : " + i);
}
System.out.println("Thread name " + mainThread.getName());
System.out.println("Main Thread Status " + mainThread.isAlive());
}
}
public class MainThreadDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Thread name- " + Thread.currentThread().getName());
System.out.println("Thread Status " + Thread.currentThread().isAlive());
System.out.println("Thread Priority " + Thread.currentThread().getPriority());
System.out.println("Is Daemon Thread " + Thread.currentThread().isDaemon());
// Creating threads
Thread t1 = new Thread(new NumThread(Thread.currentThread()), "Thread-1");
Thread t2 = new Thread(new NumThread(Thread.currentThread()), "Thread-2");
Thread t3 = new Thread(new NumThread(Thread.currentThread()), "Thread-3");
t1.start();
try {
Thread.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
t2.start();
t3.start();
System.out.println("Thread Status " + Thread.currentThread().isAlive());
}
}
Output
Thread name- main Thread Status true Thread Priority 5 Is Daemon Thread false Thread-1 Priority 5 Is Daemon Thread false Thread-1 : 0 Thread-1 : 1 Thread-1 : 2 Thread-1 : 3 Thread-1 : 4 Thread name main Main Thread Status true Thread Status true Thread-2 Priority 5 Is Daemon Thread false Thread-2 : 0 Thread-2 : 1 Thread-2 : 2 Thread-3 Priority 5 Is Daemon Thread false Thread-2 : 3 Thread-2 : 4 Thread name main Main Thread Status false Thread-3 : 0 Thread-3 : 1 Thread-3 : 2 Thread-3 : 3 Thread-3 : 4 Thread name main Main Thread Status false
As you can see for all the threads, thread priority is 5 which is same as the priority of main thread. Also all the spawned threads are non-daemon threads. You can also see from the displayed messages that main thread died while thread-2 and thread-3 were still executing.
That's all for this topic Main Thread in Java. If you have any doubt or any suggestions to make please drop a comment. Thanks!
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